@hwoarang: "Hi,
(please avoid cross-list e-mails in the future if possible. Makes
threading horrible)
<quote>
I was wondering, is there a good reason we keep our own pkgconfig files
instead of communicating that to upstream and resolve that properly?
What other distributions do? Or are we a special case and we need our
own pc files?
Regards,
Markos Chandras"
    @hwoarang: "<quote>
Why not? If the package does not work out of the box then something is
broken upstream? If it works for Debian but not for us then maybe we do
something wrong? Otherwise, if having our own pc files (assuming there
is no abuse here and we touch reverse deps only when really necessary)
why is that a problem?
I fail to understand the problem here.
I am not talking about Lua here. It's a more general question.
Regards,
Markos Chandras"
    @rich0: "<quote>
I think fixing upstream is a no-brainer.  The controversy only exists
when upstream refuses to cooperate (which seems to be the case when
we're one of six distros patching it).  If there are other situations
where we supply our own files please speak up.
When the only issue is maintainer laziness I could see fixing that in
a different way...
Rich"
    @hwoarang: "<quote>
Well to me it feels that gentoo specific .pc files is a similar problem
to any other patch that affects upstream code in order to make the
package compatible with gentoo. Some people may consider downstream pc
files more dangerous because reverse deps are affected. But really, if
there is no other alternative, we shouldn't be treating this as a
special case. We patch upstream packages all the time after all
Regards,
Markos Chandras"
    @yngwin: "<quote>
Exactly. I don't understand why this is an michael92@example.net. Obviously,
if upstream does not ship a .pc file or ships a broken one, we try
to work with upstream to get it fixed on their end. If they are
uncooperative, we fix it on our end.
Cheers,
Ben | yngwin
Gentoo developer"
    @hwoarang: "<quote>
Isn't this the same thing? If Debian creates/renames upstream pc files,
and you use Debian as a development box, you have the same problem:
Develop software which is not portable across distros.
I have done very limited upstream development myself, but my opinion has
always been that upstream developers who use
Debian/Gentoo/Fedora/$FOOlinux as their dev environment shouldn't care
about distro peculiarities. That's packagers' job, who are responsible
to make the upstream software compatible with each distribution.
 But in
I don't see how this is a bad thing. This actually makes us look good in
the sense that we stick to upstream code as much as possible.
In an ideal world, all distros would be compatible :)
Regards,
Markos Chandras"
    @ssuominen: "<quote>
Say, a package XYZ makes use of xyz.pc and it's distribution specific,
then you switch to a distribution that also ships XYZ but without
pkg-config file,
you can simply...
export FOOBAR_LIBS="-lfoo"
export FOOBAR_CFLAGS="-I/usr/include/foo"
./configure
make
make install
...as pkg-config allows using it without the .pc files by design. This
is an non-issue.
- Samuli"
    @hasufell: "Markos Chandras:
<quote>
I don't agree with that. Pkg-config files are like headers and library
files. They affect code of developers.
If I mess with random configure.ac files in ffmpeg... it doesn't really
affect any1 other than gentoo users in 99% of the cases."
    @hasufell: "Rich Freeman:
<quote>
The fact is... missing pkg-config files are in 99% of the cases all
fixable by fixing the build systems of packages that assume those
pkg-config files... more specific: provide a fallback (I gave enough
links for that in the reponse to the council agenda mail).
This improves portability overall, for upstream, for us, for other
distros and for random users."
    @hasufell: "Markos Chandras:
<quote>
Yeah, I was actually under the impression that gentoo is a
"meta-distribution" and therefor takes the pain to maintain a complex
Package Manager Specification amongst other things.
Our philosophy states that our tools "should be a joy to use". If we add
random hackery on stuff that affects portability across distros, then
this doesn't hold true anymore."
    @rich0: "<quote>
Which one of our tools is at risk of not being a joy to use?  All of
the tools we're talking about here have no origin in Gentoo.
It sounds like the impact is to upstream developers who use Gentoo not
realizing that a library they depend on doesn't actually provide a
pkg-config file across all distros.  How large an issue is this in
practice?  It sounds like somebody will build something which works
fine in their testing, and then somebody will get a compiler error on
some other distro and report it, and then they can take 2min to fix
their build system once and for all.
What solutions do we have?  Obviously we should try to get upstream to
change, but when they don't I don't see a universal policy that makes
sense.
We could ban non-upstream pkg-config files entirely, in which case
build systems that work for every other distro that supplies them may
fail on Gentoo and we need to patch them (and for users building their
own software that hardly sounds like a joy to use).  Or we could force
them to be renamed to gentoo-foo, in which case again build systems
that work fine for every other distro that doesn't do this fail on
Gentoo.  Or we could leave it up to the maintainer, in which case we
basically end up with what we have today.
I could see guidelines, but even those are going to be hazy.  Maybe
recommend using a gentoo prefix on the pkg-config file when we're the
only distro doing something.  However, then we run into the prefix
changing on a later release and then reverse dependencies break.
We could have a USE flag which blocks installation of non-upstream
pkg-config files.  Of course, it might not be practical to use since
anything which depends on the library in question might force it to
not be set so that its own build system can rely on it.  Sure, we
could patch the build system to not require it, but most likely the
build system does require it is that it is common on other distros so
we're the ones standing alone.
So, while I agree that the current state isn't ideal, I'm not sure
that it is any worse than the alternatives.
Rich"
    @hasufell: "Rich Freeman:
<quote>
Gentoo in general as a _development platform_. I'v also seen people
arguing "this library isn't used by any package, let's remove it". Not.
A. Reason.
The impact is on users as well if they try to build software with a
broken build system.
We are effectively spreading the philosophy of modifying interfaces,
libraries, headers and other things that are not trivial (and with one
of the pkgconfig file additions in lua... we also got a library rename
that breaks dlopen. So this is just the first step.).
This has at first almost no effect on others, but for us, get's a lot of
"shit" done.
Longterm, this makes it year after year more difficult to develop
software for "Linux". Instead (like valve), people start to develop for
certain distros only (like Ubuntu), because it's just too much work to
bother with all this hackery-here-hackery-there-incompatible-here
things. Maybe also a reason they start to bundle all libraries for every
single game (among the convenience factor), effectively decreasing
security overall.
As described above, it is definitely worse.
TBH, I don't want to be part of a "get shit done" distro. I could simply
switch to debian then and do all the funny "lolpatches".
I was hoping that QA is the authority that separates "get bugs fixed"
from "get shit done"."
    @rich0: "<quote>
I'm with you here, but what is the solution?
If we say we stick to upstream then we don't provide pkg-config files
at all (in these cases).  Then when Debian does the other upstreams
use them and then those packages break on Gentoo.  People are still
going to target their favorite distro no matter what we do.
The only people with the power to break the distro-targeting behavior
are the maintainers of the upstream packages.  The linux kernel
maintains a few stable branches with well-defined support periods, and
as a result you can bet that just about any distro is going to be on
one of them.  Few other projects take this kind of care.  Indeed, some
upstreams can't be bothered to change their SONAME when their ABI
changes.
You could try to get distros to come together, but that tends not to
work either.  The minor distros all have lots of incentive to do this,
but nobody cares about targeting them.  The really big distros don't
have incentive to play along, because they can just tell everybody
that if their software breaks on their distro it is their problem.
Then you have companies like RedHat which want to differentiate
themselves so the last thing they want is to make other distros as
robust, and to be fair they don't want to do the integration work only
to have others mooch.
So, in your mind what would a sane policy look like?  Should packages
like lua not provide pkg-config files even though apparently every
other distro does?  If so, where do we draw the line?  Do we follow
some particular distro like Debian?  Do we list 4 distros and allow
the file if 3/4 use it?  If we don't allow a pkg-config in general can
maintainers still have a "gentoo-foo" file?
If we want a firm policy then there needs to be a proposal for one
that makes sense.  Otherwise the council is 95% likely to just say "we
recommend that maintainers use care when creating pkg-config files but
we leave it to their discretion," because that is the only thing that
makes any sense when you can't come up with a rule that makes sense.
Rich"
    @hasufell: "Sure, this is a more complex problem.
My point is, for pkg-config files it is relatively easy to fix stuff
that depends on non-standard files (I can write a devmanual section
about that, but err... this is really trivial). The amount of these
downstream pkg-config files is not as big as you might think (yet). So
just saying "no" to all new downstream additions will not cause a big
explosion and thousands of packages failing to build. Look at the
tracker, it's just a few we know of. Cmake is mostly not affected,
autotools is often complex enough to still find the libs, Makefiles need
a one-line patch. And, by the time we discover more, we can work towards
removing them.
It will raise awareness about this problem and about the fact that
distros like debian tend to do it the lazy way.
So it is a pretty easy way to improve portability across distros and so on.
We shouldn't do things wrong just because they didn't blow up in our
face yet.
I am confused why this gets so much attention. The additional workload
is really minor. So, not allowing this makes sense to me.
For exotic exceptions and corner cases, we can still bend the rules.
But, "debian does it too" is not one."
    @peter: "<quote>
I think this is a sane default.
I like Gentoo to stay very close to upstream.
If upstream pkg A depends on $distro-specific foo of pkg B then that
will obviously not work in an environment only following upstreams,
and will require effort to untie gentoo pkg A from $distro specifics.
As has been said, that's ultimately a portability problem of A, which
becomes the maintainer's problem when creating gentoo pkg A.
This will mean that some unportable upstreams cannot be packaged for
Gentoo without fixing their bugs first. If they don't consider this a
bug then they are making a bad decision and sadly the Gentoo
maintainer sortof has to live with that. :\
I don't think it's fair to force a Gentoo maintainer to do any
specific thing here. If a Gentoo maintainer is willing to untie
unhelpful upstreams from their own bugs for the benefit of Gentoo
then that's fantastic, even if upstreams don't understand so.
But I don't think it's reasonable to *require* from Gentoo maintainers.
If I were looking at a bug which asks to create an ebuild from an
upstream which has a $distro-specific bugtie then I might as well
close it as WONTFIX as long as the upstream don't fix their problem.
But I would equally welcome anyone else to reopen the Gentoo bug if
they had untied the bugtie.
//Peter"
    @ssuominen: "<quote>
Except having pkg-config is the only way to fix some of the build issues
we are seeing
today, like getting 'Libs.private: ' for static linking, there has been
multiple bugs lately,
and we are in middle of process of obsoleting every custom foo-config
due to same
reasons, so having pkg-config files is an absolute requirement.
Some binary-only distros might get away without them, but we won't.
pkg-config by design works without .pc files if needed, by exporting
FOO_LIBS
and FOO_CFLAGS, so if this is the only problem with them, it's really no
problem
at all compared to the problems caused by lacking the pkg-config files
(Are we seriously discussing banning something useful as pkg-config
files?! That's retarded. Must be some joke.)"
    @peter: "<quote>
I honestly don't think that it's Gentoo's place to fix those issues.
Just error out. Make users complain to upstream when upstream has a
problem. Don't hide the problem and amass a huge support workload.
Again I don't think that's Gentoo's decision to make. It could
certainly be a user's decision, but complexity would explode.
You haven't provided a rationale, only a circular argument:
"We're taking action which requires .pc so having .pc is a requirement."
My key point is that it isn't Gentoo's responsibility or duty to fix
problems introduced by upstreams, even if Gentoo developers are so
skilled that they would be able to.
I think your time is better spent on things that are not broken.
I think it's perfectly fine to refuse including something that is
broken and unmaintainable. That doesn't mean that one has to be an
asshole about it and treat requsts badly however. It's easy to
politely decline. "This is too much effort for me to maintain.
Please become a developer and maintain it if you want it, or proxy
maintain it."
I think it is a problem, because Gentoo starts having an opinion.
I don't like that. For me, Gentoo is all about letting me decide.
That means I must be exposed to broken upstreams, so that *I* can
decide how to deal with them.
Maybe introduce a USE flag for installing .pc:s in ${FILESDIR} ?
Don't own those problems - they aren't yours.
I don't think I said to ban them. I said that I want Gentoo to stay
close to upstream by default. I also said that maintainers shouldn't
be expected to untie upstream bugknots.
Please do not call me retarded again.
Thanks
//Peter"
    @alonbl: "<quote>
build system, most of the these result from lack of knowledge. Up
until now, downstream patches that were actually used by users found
their way better into upstream than just complaining that stuff
breaks, as upstream honestly does not have the knowledge to fix. It
also gives a chance to test them properly before submitting.
There are projects that will not accept any patch regardless of the
problem it solves, unless it is for their own favour distribution and
packager, so not providing solution for our users does not makes sense
to me.
Regards,
Alon"
    @hwoarang: "<quote>
Gentoo should be close to upstream as much as possible and developers
are actively encouraged during recruitment sessions to always try to
upstream their patches. If you think a maintainer deviated from upstream
for no good reason, well, I would like to think this is an exception
instead of common practice.
Regards,
Markos Chandras"
    @hasufell: "Samuli Suominen:
<quote>
I said repeatedly... if it is the ONLY way to fix something, then we
have good reason to bend the rule. (and even then it should be made
hard, as in: open this for discussion first. In addition, all of these
non-upstream files have to be documented as such.)
However, currently, this is not a rule, just some policy people would
rather ignore since it might cause you a bit more work.
I feel it is time to make some more strict rules after seeing people
importing plain debian hacks, including renaming of libraries, renaming
of pkgconfig files and probably worse to come.
No, you are twisting words here."
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